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ASIN: B0CH3TW63P ID #115988 |
Hero of Metalhaven (Metal and Blood Book 1) (Rated: 18+)
Product Type: Kindle StoreReviewer: Jeff  Review Rated: 18+ | Amazon's Price: Price N/A
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Further Comments... | ||
This was my last read of 2025, which I'm just getting around to reviewing now. I'll admit, I was fully planning on DNF'ing this book by about 50 pages in. The main character (Finn) is obnoxious. It's your basic post-apocalyptic authoritarian society, if Running Man and Hunger Games had a baby. If you don't follow the rules, you get put into a death-match game with a bunch of hunters trying to execute "criminals" and if a "criminal" wins, they get their freedom. Anyway, one of the interesting parts of the book is that all workers are rated zero to five on their ability to produce work product, and zero to five on their ability to produce viable non-damaged reproductive material. There was a nuclear event that basically makes most of the population sterile (or with mutated DNA) and the planet uninhabitable, so the richie riches bailed on the planet and live in an orbital space station utopia while the rest of the general population slaves away on the planet to produce resources for them. If you're a "double zero" (basically useless as a worker AND useless in repopulating the human species), you're cannon fodder and killed for sport. Finn happens to be a "double five" which means he's an excellent worker in Metalhaven (the sector that breaks down machine parts for scrap), AND has to make regular trips to the spank bank so they can use his "voluntary donation" to help repopulate the world. You know, just your standard post-apocalyptic setting with ... *checks notes* ... some casual eugenics and state-sponsored sexual assault. What immediately turned me off about this book is Finn is just such a jerk, to absolutely everybody. Multiple characters confront him on this, and his literal answer to why he always antagonizes everyone in the government is, "Because fuck them, that's why." It turns out that this actually is a major plot point (he's an asshole because he knows he can get away with it; he's too valuable for them to get rid of... until they can't turn a blind eye anymore, of course), and there's a real earned character moment later in the story where he thinks of himself as a courageous disruptor who stands up to authority, and even his friends are like, "Dude, you get away with it because you're so special, but the rest of us have to pay the price." It makes him rethink the way he sees himself and the decisions he makes. The end of the book was pretty good. <<< SPOILER ALERT >>> Finn wins the game (shocker, I know), which means he's exonerated and invited to the elite part of society to live like a king and become a hunter in his own right. He's not happy about this and considering just going out in a blaze of glory, until he meets one of the other hunters and realizes she's part of a resistance that is determined to overthrow this authoritarian government. Finn commits to the cause and the book ends on a cliffhanger, promising to continue Finn's journey to stick it to the man at some point in Books 2 through 5 of the series. I'm not sure I liked it enough to continue the series, but it was a decent-enough read (and I do like the author) that I saw it through to the end and I'm glad I did. | ||
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Created Jan 20, 2026 at 2:53pm •
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